Jihad and European Multiculturalism
From the desk of James McConalogue on Wed, 2006-08-16 18:56
The jihadists are clearly winning their battle over the British people. In the UK, the Labour government has shown that it is more than willing to jeopardise national security in favour of its oppressive multicultural agenda. Violent Muslims – a hotchpotch of infantile soul-searching converts, theocratic barbarians and permanently incensed and uneducated nobodies – who are supposed to be living as British citizens are intending to kill the people they live among. Clearly, the European multicultural project is failing to such a degree that citizens not only possess a visceral hatred of one another but they are now at war with one another.
Western European multicultural programmes, which traditionally structured themselves around a liberal governance of individuals regardless of religion, race, colour and creed, are no longer sustainable for the societies they govern. They are gently becoming the human societies fit for different herds of religious savages, equipped with rights but not responsibilities, provided with authority but no elective legitimacy, administered with intensive social policing without a true realm of private activity, filled with a countless number of illegal and unmeasured migrants far removed from common social mores of both work and leisure. Such societies seemed condemned to tragedies on an apocalyptic scale.
An ongoing trend is the social disaffection brought by the infusion of Muslim immigrants into those European societies. The most disquieting of all those immigration (mis)measures is the pockets of private space given delivered to violent Muslims, or jihadists, unable to withstand opposition to the Islamic doctrine – and frequently so uneducated as to no longer understand the meaning of their doctrine and how the modern world relates to it – hoping for the devastation of the society which originally contracted each of them the right to live freely. In the hands of fundamentalist Islam, Western society and all its fruits have become pearl before the swine.
In recent days, counter-terrorist officials undermined a British terror plot by Islamic terrorists to blow up nine transatlantic airlines. The Metropolitan police estimated that the terror plot would have come at the cost of 3,000 lives. Immediate arrests ensued for 24 Muslims living in the Walthamstow, High Wycombe and Birmingham regions. The exposure of these arrests seemed to be related to the detainment of a British man in Pakistan, Rashid Rauf – but as yet, the exact relationship has not been clarified. MI5 claimed that the suspects were planning to smuggle bombs aboard up to nine airliners to be detonated over the Atlantic or over American cities. It also believes that up to 400,000 people in Britain have sympathies for a violent breed of jihad around the world and as many as 1,200 are actively involved in a terrorist network. The devastation of the current attack would have been unimaginable.
The creed of Islam, supported by its jihadist interpretation, cannot be supported by European multicultural programmes – perhaps, more to the point, we may have arrived at that point that we must now face that our multicultural programme can no longer afford the Islamic deviancy. Unlike other valuable and rich cultures and religions that integrate successfully, modern Islam seems steadfast in its principles of war and violence. Islam carries with it a powerful political and religious history. This violence, which the editor of The Asian Age, M. J. Akbar, once called the “Medina Syndrome,” imparts the belief that Islam is under such a significant threat from its enemies that its only response is to be gripped by collective unity, faith, violence and war.
The history of the Islamic project has always been a political project – the actions of the Prophet Muhammad begin with the battle of Badr and the slaughter of the Quraysh. Jihad is derived from the Arabic, jahd, meaning striving. It does not matter if there is success in jihad since death immediately qualifies one for martyrdom and paradise. As the Prophet warns Muslims – ‘al Jannat-a tahata silal es sayoof’ – ‘Know that paradise is under the shade of swords’. If there are doubts as to the success of Islamic violence, the success of jihad ensured the spread of Islam – from Muhammad’s first conquer of Medina, through to Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, Alleppo, Qadisiyya, Madain, Nehawand, Hamadan, the Caspian, Basra, Isfahan, Nishapur, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Sind, the Indus valley, Fustat, Alexandria (Egypt), the Maghreb, Gibraltar, Cordoba, Toledo and Sargossa.
In spite of denials at empire-building, jihad ensures effective empire-builders fixed on the subservience of all to Allah. Jihad is the most effective assurance that the Islamic people die for its cause(s). To note, this is severely at odds with the making of Christian political development, of which, modern liberalism is a legitimized extension. Islam occupies no such place in this development. In striving for a heroic persona and international martyrdom, knowing that paradise is under the guidance of swords, Islam is capable of enforcing a public, political and personal belief in its creed. The future governance of a multicultural Europe, creating domains of private activity justified by rights, cannot withstand such violence and will continue to suffer at the hands of Islam, effectively making the rightful citizens of European states homeless within their own homes.
The Western European polity, its cultural way of life, its historic religious grounding in Christianity, is, without a shadow of a doubt, fundamentally different from that order created under Islam. The treatment of Islam in modern society has been, in spite of many complaints of political correctness, radically different. It might be thought that we could ignore the differences between Christianity, underpinning the Western way of life, and Islam, and instead, concentrate on their similarities. Yet, this is to ignore that there are fundamental differences – between Islam and Western culture, state, values, and way of life. Moreover, Islam falls into Western Europe already equipped with its own internal model of theocratic governance and the necessary values of its citizens – if we do not clarify those issues of governance, then the citizens of Islam, going by the name of “Muslims”, will be in constant confusion over its rightful place in a modern liberal society.
A justification of the liberal order and its inherent personal freedoms cannot afford to be based upon the ignorance of difference or the pretence that the differences can be glossed by dwelling only on similarities simply provides a philosophical façade. Certainly in the UK, the New Labour Third Way philosophy hopes to achieve such a façade through its perverted multicultural programmes but it is obvious that they do not work. There are clear differences between Islam and the West, when we conceive of both concepts as cultural, religious and political entities.
It should be clear to the West that Islam, as a doctrine and practice, is a different religion from Christianity. Islam, when translated from the Arabic, means “submission”, and should be understood as submission to God. A Muslim is one who surrenders or “submits” to God. In the West, it is certain that that the requirement of a complete submission to God makes it incredibly difficult for Islam to sit comfortably alongside a model of free expression, requiring discussion through rational belief. For Islam, Allah, or God, delivered his word to Muhammad through the archangel Gabriel between the years 610 and 632. Although there are many prophets for Islam, the true and final prophet is Muhammad. It is set against Christianity and Judaism most deeply because it holds fundamentally different doctrines and practices as important to its faith. For Islam, the only record of written revelation is the Qur’an, not the Bible or Torah (which it holds to have been distorted). The common beliefs of all Muslims are: the belief in the one God, a belief in all the messengers – the most essential of which is Muhammad – a belief in the angels and prophets sent by God, a belief in the books delivered by God, a belief in the day of judgement, the resurrection, and fate.
The Christian doctrine of God as the trinity – the father, son and the holy spirit – is fundamentally wrong for Islam, since God’s oneness cannot be challenged. On the Muslim view, the trinity represents a kind of polytheistic doctrine in which God is decentred. As such, “Moslems pride themselves on being the only Unitarians. Christians are Trinitarians.” Beyond religious texts, there are also expectations of Muslims to uphold the practices of Islam: the faith in the oneness of God, prayer for five times a day, giving help to the needy, fasting and also if one is fit and able enough, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Subsequent to the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the early Muslims constituted a set of sacred Islamic laws, which were intended to guide them in their everyday lives. This Islamic law is known as the Shari’a, and for modern Muslims in contemporary societies, its value remains debated. However, regardless of the place of the Qur’anic law and the Hadith within Islamic thought itself, it is Islam – unlike Christianity – that is a lay religion with no sacraments, hierarchy of persons or clergy, capable of preaching practical and attainable ideals for the lay person.
Over the ages, the true interpretation of the verses in the Qur’an has often been a source of inconsistency and controversy for Muslim scholars and interpreters in general, since the meaning may have been lost over time, during several periods following the death of the Prophet. This might be seen as a basis for why Rushdie’s Satanic Verses reaches the heart of Islam, which has taken the Qur’an as its one true text but has itself been internally disputed by Muslim scholars, with regards to its purity and authenticity.
It should also be apparent to the West that Islam is also a different political entity from that of Christianity. The Prophet Muhammad, after leaving Mecca as a young despised visionary returned as a military leader to establish Islam in this new religious capital and conquered Mecca in the year 630. He had summoned 10,000 warriors and followers to achieve this power. Two years later, Muhammad had died and the first caliph (leader), abu-Bakr felt assured by the success of heroic and violent conquest that no religion would exist other than Islam. The battle over the rightful caliphate succession to the Prophet Muhammad split Islam in two, reflecting the contemporary divisions between the Sunnis and the Shiites. Islamization began in the little-known Arabia but in the generations after Muhammad’s death, it ended ruling over extensive parts of European soil.
The expansion of the religious ideology in the early conquests was based on economic motives and self-interest, justified under the doctrine of “holy war” (jihad). Those Christians and Jews utterly dissatisfied with life under the Byzantine tyranny did not take long to convert to Islam. In fact, even from the very early conquests, there was not even a forced conversion, since Christians and Jews still attained the protection of their property, rights and lives as long as they paid tribute to Islam. Scholarship still remains divided over the treatment of Christians and Jews in the historical epochs that followed. In its politics, one could quite easily argue that unlike Christianity, Islam is not willing to recognise the distinction between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and temporal, and ultimately, between din (religion) and dawla (state). It is clear that the Islamic faith will continue to be bound in enforcing its religious faith through the practices of the state.
It should also be clear to the West that Islam has also been held as a different cultural entity from that of Christianity. Islam has been treated as fundamentally different if one observes the history of Western literature. St. John of Damascus (d. 749) and Theophanes the Confessor (758-818) were amongst the first to depict Muhammad as a false prophet. The bishop of Cordova, Eulogius, was killed by an Islam caliph in 859, following his voluntary martyrdom, and earlier claims that when Muslims were waiting for angels to descend to the Prophet’s dead body, no angels had descended but dogs arrived and ate the corpse. An infamous missionary of medieval Europe, Raymond Lull (1235-1315) had also shouted in the streets of Tunis that Christian law was holy, whilst the Muslim law was false – he was quickly stoned to death by a mob.
From the fourteenth century through to the nineteenth century, a widely circulated Western myth was that a white pigeon sat on the shoulder of the founder of Islam, and it was mistaken for an angel dictating the word of God (a myth that Shakespeare refers to in Henry VI). Dante (d. 1321) had asserted that the rightful place for Muhammad was in the ninth hell, designed for the makers of schisms. In the seventeenth century, Western scholars of the Arab world understood Islam, on the whole, to be a fraudulent project. The first Arabic professors at Cambridge (Simon Ockley in the eighteenth century) and Oxford (Edward Pocock in the seventeenth century) Universities dispelled some myths of Muhammad and Islam, portraying Arabic texts in the context of the world setting, rather than as purely religious. By the mid-nineteenth century, English and French professors, in addition to German poets and philosophers, had developed a more enlightened, tolerant and careful approach in their treatment of Muhammad, particularly noticeable in Carlyle’s acceptance of Muhammad as a heroic figure. The portrayal of the differences began wild and mythical, but they did not disappear – the chief reason being that there are fundamental differences between Islam and the Western way of life.
Even though we cannot take Islam to be strictly opposed to Christianity – since in their historical realities they have often crossed paths – the modern personal freedoms, entrenched within the territories of former Christendom, appear to stand posed against many Muslim group’s requirement for respect towards the Islamic faith. The differences must be taken seriously, if the continued threat of jihad in Eurabia is to be understood as a genuine plot in the destruction of Western way of life – I understand that the jihad loyalists offer a genuine position on the West and a reaction to their position ought also to be rational and sincere.